Here is a re-hash of the quickstart exposing the core concepts in ruote.

Ruote as a workflow engine comes as an “onion”. There’s a storage at the core, taking care of all the persistence. A worker where all the orchestration work happens surrounds the core. The dashboard has all the levers to launch, pause, cancel process instances.

Multiple process instances can be launched at the same time. Multiple instances of different processes with different initial workitem fields can be launched in the same system and run in parallel, much like different processes on top of an OS.